Optical contamination: its prevention in the XUV spectrographs flown by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the Apollo Telescope Mount.

During construction and testing of the XUV spectrographs flown in the ATM by the Naval Research Laboratory, many problems associated with optical contamination were encountered. Solving these problems required setting up a contamination prevention program to select the materials used in constructing the instruments and to delineate procedures in assembling, testing, and storing the instruments. A brief description is given of methods of assessing the effects of contamination and of the procedures used to prevent contamination.